Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0099429578, Paperback)

Balzac was a man who turned all his life into words. From his extensive correspondence with his family, with the women he loved and above all, with Madame Hanska, the imperious Polish Countess, and with a novelist’s eye for scene, Pritchett shows us Balzac in the Parisian swim of the 1830s and ‘40s - the Paris of Louis Phillippe, Daumier, Delacroix and the Romantics.